Most digital cameras have a single mode of operation, and as such, do not provide any special processing for documents. As can be appreciated, since the same image processing techniques and image capture parameters are uniformly applied to the capture image without regard to the content of the image, documents captured by these digital cameras are of very poor quality and are often not readable.
There are some cameras, such as the RDC-i700 digital camera available from Ricoh Inc. of West Caldwell, N.J., that have a document mode. With these cameras, a user can manually select a document mode. Once in document mode, the camera attempts to use camera settings that are more suitable for documents versus a natural scene.
Unfortunately, the user has to switch the digital camera into document mode. While a user is very good at determining whether a scene is a document, the user may forget to switch to normal mode when taking the next picture. As can be appreciated, this requirement for the user to remember to switch between normal mode and document mode can lead to poor image quality for those natural scenes, where the setting is document mode. Consequently, it would be desirable for there to be a mechanism that would automatically detect whether a scene is a natural scene or a document and automatically switch to an appropriate mode with user intervention.
Furthermore, those cameras with a document mode offer only tolerable and primitive image processing that leads to very noisy images. For example, the documents often appear very dark, and the text often appears blurry. Consequently, it is desirable for there to be a digital camera that has improved image processing capabilities so that appearance of captured documents can be more clear.
Based on the foregoing, there remains a need for a method and system for a mechanism to automatically determining that a scene is a document and tailoring the image capture and image processing accordingly and that overcomes the disadvantages set forth previously.